(read the original Twitter post here.)
Smoothness is a function of scale.
Imagine having an amazing camera. Now imagine strapping that camera into a drone, taking it maybe a thousand feet straight up, pointing it back down at the ground, and turning it on. For simplicity, let’s key in on something large and obvious.
How about a wheat field?
Viewed from a height, a field of wheat looks like a vast, smooth ocean, with wind-driven wave patterns rippling across its fluid surface.
Drop toward the surface, and the perspective changes. The wheat ocean's smoothness dissolves into a chaotic jumble of individual plants, fracturing the big picture into a million pieces. Details dominate. Stalks, leaves, seed heads, broken or damaged plants, healthy plants, everything individual, each plant bewilderingly unique.
Zoom in some more, and smoothness returns. Your field of vision shrinks to a single leaf, pushing the chaotic jumble of plants out of mind, out of scale, and off-camera. Order and visual clarity reassert themselves.
(Until, that is, you bust out your microscope, and the leaf’s smooth texture becomes chaotic and mountainous at the new scale...)
Smoothness is a function of scale.
Like layers of frosting in a cake, smoothness and graininess tend to alternate, richly complementing toward a satisfying whole.
But that creates a natural problem of perspective:
Order, or chaos? Scale determines what you see.
…
wheat field
jumble of plants
single leaf
microscopic detail
…
But what you understand depends on how well you can change scales.
drilling down gets you reductionism
soaring higher gets you emergence
staying put gets you oversimplification
If you want to know how things work, get good at zooming in and zooming out.
How does all of this apply to human universals?
In human affairs, most of us live our daily lives in the chaos layers.
Despite our best efforts to chart a steady course, we find ourselves blocked by strange, tangled thickets, buffeted by chance events, and bereft of sensible big-picture guidance.
But we also have tantalizing glimpses of smooth, highly systemic, predictable behavior all around us, at both higher and lower layers!
The good: using our minds, we can arm ourselves with detailed knowledge of the systemic steering currents in several nearby layers, both above and below, so that we can all live richer, more productive lives...
The bad: or we can wander, lost in endless contemplation of fractally layered infinities, while our daily lives crumble into chaos…
The ugly: OR, we can shut out the richness, and lead cloistered, narrow, hopelessly dull lives...
As in all things, the trick is in knowing which approach to pursue, and how hard to pursue it, and through how many fractal layers, in order to achieve our aims.
Here, then, is what I propose:
In order to understand the panoramic sweep of historical forces, analogous to the ripples in our wheat ocean, we need to balance our perception of them against a set of reductionist universals hidden WELL BELOW the chaotic buffeting of daily human affairs.
BUT, and this is very important, we need to do this without getting locked into a reductionist mindset.
OUR PURPOSE in seeking smooth reductive universals below is to help us make predictive sense of the smooth forces above, so that we can live better lives in the turbulent here and now.
So we need depth AND accessibility at the same time, or we will be unable to reach our goal.
And that means narrowing the scope of our reductive frame WHILE ALSO broadening the terminology*, so that any human universals we find down there are instantly accessible to everyone.
Only then can we build toward the panoramic heights with confidence.
Can we design a reductionist foundation that is strong enough to support our soaring aims? How far do we dig down, to build up? How will we know when we’ve reached bottom?
We must seek the nexus of universality, invariance, self-evidence, and consensus.
Dig far enough, and you’ll find one here:
"Instinct handles the basics of human life."
"Conscious attention has limits."
"Intelligence uses patterns and mental habits as workarounds."
And that’s our starting point.
* I have pungent things to say about terminology, but they can wait! This draft is overlong already.
Many thanks to Malcolm Ocean for the comment that served as my writing prompt.